Nothing to grouse about

I DO LOVE THE RUN-UP TO THE grouse shooting season. The “rifles” will be out to “slaughter” (and sometimes “blast”) thousands of little birds “reared” in “pens”. Not even Annie Oakley could hit a grouse with a semi-automatic. “Slaughter” suggests nothing escapes, which is laughable, considering a grouse can hit upwards of 40mph in a straight line without a tail wind at head height. And the keeper who can successfully rear grouse in captivity has yet to be born.

There was a time when I could do a very good impression of Private Eye’s Colonel Bufton-Tufton doing the nose trick with a gin and tonic. But I’ve given up intemperate explosions when confronted by hyperbolic reports of life on the grouse moor produced by my more enthusiastic colleagues. I rather look forward to spotting the first teminological manglings of the season. A bit like delighting in the first cuckoo of spring.

There used to be, until their website became jammed solid with bored stock-brokers, an online shooting game which allowed punters to select grouse/pheasant/woodcock and the speed and rate at which they appeared. After ten minutes I discarded grouse and had been reduced to Level One Pheasant, which was very slow birds straight overhead and therefore, theoretically, a doddle. Ho ho.

If I was sensible I would take me off to the nearest shooting school for a technical brush-up. And I did once go to very nice man who had coached the Indian Clay Pigeon Olympic Team. But waiting for a clay pigeon at ten-second intervals, is not the same as gossiping in the grouse butt and being overwhelmed by an unexpected covey just as you are struggling with a cigarette lighter.

Indeed, I shot so badly after my Olympic clay pigeon session that my host loudly announced “the blighter must have been to shooting school”. While shooting clay pigeons is fun, unlike game birds, they go slower and slower whereas the real thing, unless I am missing something, goes faster and faster.

On the grouse front, by the time you read this I shall have spent a very agreeable day on the hills around Newtonmore where my father-in-law dropped dead in his element but, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, without snapping the stock of his lightsome William Pape of Newcastle 12-bore.

I shall have struggled to keep in line with an army of 14 to 20 year olds and a ridiculously agile goat-like octogenarian who is an annual fixture. The fact is that walking up, which is what most people will have done on the 12th, more in honour of the occasion than big bags, still has to be the best way to shoot grouse, if only because the day, be it driving rain or sweltering sun and usually both, is comfortingly predictable.

The keeper will have assured us it’s been an “afa wet spring” and not to expect much and will have complained about golden eagles wrecking the entire side of a hill. We will consequently have been amazed and gratified to pick up three or four dozen brace, exactly what he knew we would get all along. Several dogs will have gone AWOL after hares and someone, maybe me, will have wound up soaked to the skin after falling in a heather-hidden crevasse.

There is lobster and cold roe deer and hideous quantities of beer and wine for lunch in the hut by the burn, and ice cream and port. And the beauteous New Zealand student help will have struck up an entirely inappropriate relationship, or the makings of one, with the golden-haired son of the house studying geography and anthropology at Edinburgh Uni.

Slaughter of the innocents? If measured in coronaries, torn ligaments and midge bites.